Inside Syrup: The Credit Book Behind the Yield
Syrup's loans can stay out for months, yet 95.4% of the $12.16B paid to withdrawing depositors arrived within a day. We read the $1.25B book behind the yield: how the return is earned, what supports the loans and how quickly the portfolio turns back into cash.
Updated 11 November 2026: data are refreshed to 11 November, except income history, which runs to 31 October (Figures 8 and 10). Maple confirmed that 0xBE8F, 0x1D2F and 0xaf69 are its own wallets; sections 2, 5.1 and 6.2 now follow its account.
Key takeaways
Syrup turns stablecoin deposits into a managed lending portfolio. Most capital goes into institutional credit, backed largely by crypto collateral, while strategy allocations and cash help meet withdrawals. Over the 90 days to 11 November, annualised growth in share value was around 5%. The question for a depositor is how that return is earned, what supports the loans and how quickly the portfolio can turn back into cash.
Syrup’s loans can remain outstanding for months while depositors receive their money much sooner. Across the three Syrup pools and the separate High Yield Secured pool examined here, about 95% of the money paid out arrived within a day of the original request. Cash, borrower repayments and strategy allocations bridge the two timelines, and a lender’s exit depends on how they work together.
1. How Syrup fits together
A lender deposits stablecoins into a pool and receives shares whose value reflects its assets and liabilities. Maple manages the portfolio behind those shares: the Pool Delegate approves loans and allocations, loan managers fund and account for them, and each loan contract records the borrower’s debt and payment terms.
High Yield Secured belongs to Maple Institutional and holds a separate USDC lending portfolio. It uses the same infrastructure as the Syrup pools, but access is permissioned and its strategy allows collateral to be deployed into staking or further secured lending.
This article follows syrupUSDC, syrupUSDT and syrupUSDG, with High Yield Secured included as a separate comparison. Funding, loan-life and withdrawal statistics cover all four unless stated otherwise.
2. Building the book
A pool share is supported by more than the loans it holds. Alongside borrower debt, the portfolio contains cash and capital deployed into other yield-generating positions. On 11 November, the three Syrup pools held $1.25B of Loan Book principal across 38 facilities. Another $239.9M of pool assets consisted of strategy allocations, cash and accrued interest. Together, these assets support depositors’ shares, although they return capital through different routes.
Maple splits each pool into a Loan Book, its credit facilities to borrowers, and a Non-Loan Book of strategy allocations, cash and accrued interest. Among the strategy allocations, the entries Maple labels Cross-Pool are capital one Syrup pool holds in another: syrupUSDG lists $46.3M in syrupUSDC and $5M in syrupUSDT. These are allocations into the other two pools, held through a Maple wallet (section 6.2).
Maple’s warehouse facility with Kraken is one example of the financing it arranges. The facility supplies USDC to Kraken’s OTC lending programme through a dedicated vehicle, with Maple as senior lender and BTC and ETH collateral held by Kraken Financial. Because the money funds another lending business, that business’s loans, custody and legal structure matter alongside the collateral value.
Once capital leaves a pool, Maple can add to an existing facility, receive repayments or fund another contract with the same borrower. Since March 2024 the four pools have funded 340 contracts, counting facilities used for strategy allocations. At 11 November, 72 still carried material balances, totalling about $1.73B.
2.1 April’s contraction and loan turnover
April 2026 was the loan contracts’ busiest funding month, even as pool assets contracted sharply (Figure 1). The Kelp bridge exploit on 18 April intensified withdrawal pressure across DeFi and Syrup after leaving Aave with bad debt.
Of $1.97B funded across the four pools, $1.66B went into increases to existing facilities and $315M into newly funded contracts. Repayments and principal reductions during refinancing totalled $2.66B, leaving the outstanding book $685M smaller by month-end. Most of the month’s funding went into facilities already in use, inside a book that shrank overall.
Borrower addresses are another way to follow the money. One address can draw on several contracts and more than one pool, so its exposure can outlast any single facility.
2.2 Concentration
At 11 November, 21 addresses owed principal in the three Syrup pools’ Loan Book. The five largest accounted for about 60% of the book, and the ten largest for 85%. Three addresses borrowed from more than one pool, connecting otherwise separate portfolios through exposure to the same borrower address. One of the 21, 0xBE8F, is a Maple wallet: Maple says its $30M facility funds a client’s USDC loan (section 6.2).
Lending currencies are concentrated too. USDC is about 70% of the three Syrup pools’ Loan Book, followed by USDT at 17% and USDG at 13%. These are the currencies borrowers must repay. The assets supporting those obligations can be different, so lending a stablecoin does not limit the pool’s exposure to that stablecoin.
Behind those obligations sits another concentration: BTC and WBTC account for about 79% of reported Loan Book collateral. Different borrower addresses can therefore remain exposed to the same bitcoin price move. The stablecoin-backed facility introduces a different set of dependencies, which we examine alongside the crypto-backed loans in section 5.
3. Short notice, longer loan lives
The time between lending and repayment depends on the facility’s terms. Maple reports both Open Term loans, where principal calls initiate a contractual repayment notice period, and Fixed Term loans with published maturity dates. At 11 November, ten fixed-term facilities accounted for $426.7M, roughly one-third of the three Syrup pools’ Loan Book.
Those maturities extend from December 2026 to September 2027. The largest fixed-term facility alone carries $200M and matures on 30 April 2027. Open-term notice periods vary widely. About 26% of the Loan Book can be recalled within a week and another 18% within 30 days. The remaining 56% needs more than 30 days’ notice or sits in fixed-term loans.
Short notice can still coexist with a long-running lending relationship. Across both types of facility, about 77% of current principal sits in contracts opened more than three months earlier. Contract age shows how long capital has remained deployed; notice periods and published maturities describe the terms for bringing it back.
The repayment history offers one measure of how principal calls have worked. Among 196 completed contracts with a prior principal call, 195 reached zero principal within 24 hours of their final call; the remaining contract took about 5.2 days.
This sample captures calls preceding full repayment. It leaves unresolved calls outside the comparison and does not measure the response to every call made during a facility’s life.
Completed contracts show how long those relationships lasted in practice. Among 247 contracts with material funding that had finished, the median life was 84 days. About a third of cumulative funding passed through contracts that stayed open for six months to a year. Loans still outstanding are absent from that distribution, so the longest current facilities have yet to contribute their final duration.
Market conditions can bring several relationships to an end around the same time. October and November 2025 each recorded 23 principal calls. After the 10 October market shock, Maple reported working with borrowers to add collateral, repay early and shift backing towards BTC.
What matters to a depositor is how repayments line up with withdrawals. Notice periods govern one source of future cash; while loans stay open, the pool can also pay from cash it holds and from strategy allocations. Section 6 shows how those routes have worked together.
4. From interest to share value
Borrowers pay contractual interest alongside service fees, but those payments do not translate directly into the return on a pool share. At 11 November, principal-weighted borrowing costs across the three Syrup Loan Books ranged from about 5.35% to 6.29%, including service fees. The income retained by each pool also depends on management fees and on where the rest of its assets are deployed.
Across the four pools, cumulative gross interest distributed through the studied contracts reached $139.5M by 11 November. Management fees deducted $12.6M, leaving $126.9M for the pools; service fees were separate borrower payments. These figures cover interest distributed through loan contracts, including contracts used for strategy allocations, while excluding direct Aave/Sky returns and top-ups.
Borrowing APR and share growth measure different stages of the income chain. Removing 0.25 percentage points of service fees leaves contractual interest of roughly 5.10–6.04%, before management fees. The retained interest contributes to a share’s return in proportion to the pool’s net assets deployed in those loans. Income from other allocations and top-ups comes on top, which is why the loan-book rate alone does not set share growth.
The gap varies by pool. Loans make up about 96% of syrupUSDC’s net assets, enough on current rates to account for its share growth. In syrupUSDT and syrupUSDG they make up 79% and 54%, so on our estimate strategy income and top-ups carry about 1.3 and 2.3 percentage points of their yields.
The following breakdown covers the three Syrup pools and measures income recognised in their accounts through 31 October. It combines income accrued through loan contracts, net of management fees and including interest not yet paid, with direct Aave/Sky returns and top-ups. Top-ups are additional transfers into the pools, separate from deposits and the income recorded through those contracts. They are a distribution channel rather than a single source of return: the funds can include strategy proceeds or rewards. Our query records them as non-deposit receipts. They reached $768K across the three pools in October 2026, the highest month in the series, above April’s $679K.
For syrupUSDG, part of those transfers can be traced to USDG rewards. Maple belongs to the Global Dollar Network, whose participants share rewards generated by USDG reserves. We also observed approximately $6.0M in recurring PYUSD payments to a wallet used in Maple’s strategies between April and October 2026. The payer’s role and the amount ultimately distributed to each pool remain unconfirmed.
As interest accrues, each share can claim more of the pool’s assets, even before all of that interest has been collected in cash. Over the three months to 11 November, annualised share growth was 5.1% in syrupUSDC, 4.9% in syrupUSDT, 5.0% in syrupUSDG and 5.4% in High Yield Secured.
Share value reflects the pool’s recorded accounts. Collateral can lose value before an impairment is recognised, so a rising share-price series does not rule out an underlying economic loss.
Loan-interest accrual remained positive in syrupUSDC and syrupUSDT through both the 10 October 2025 sell-off and the April 2026 Kelp incident. syrupUSDG’s line starts in late June 2026, after both. USDT’s yield spike on 19 April reflected a $124,018 additional distribution rather than a higher loan-accrual rate.
5. Looking through the collateral
At 11 November, Maple reported about $2.02B of collateral against $1.25B of Loan Book principal across the three Syrup pools, equivalent to aggregate coverage of about 162%. That ratio describes the book as a whole, but the collateral and repayment obligations remain attached to individual facilities.
The ratio moves with the book. On 2 April, one borrower address fully repaid two institutional-credit facilities: $320M in syrupUSDC and $80M in syrupUSDT. These repayments match the $400M decline in Maple’s reported institutional loan principal that day. Maple records the corresponding BTC and ETH collateral as returned. Aggregate reported collateral also fell, while coverage improved from about 152% to 161% as the book contracted, under Maple’s earlier reporting scope.
5.1 What backs the loans
BTC dominates reported Loan Book collateral, followed by XRP and ETH, while WBTC adds further bitcoin exposure. USDC contributes another $50M, backing a USDT-denominated facility. These assets support different repayment obligations: crypto-backed loans depend heavily on market prices and collateral management, while stablecoin backing introduces issuer, redemption and depeg exposure.
High Yield Secured is shown as a separate comparison. Its seven facilities with reported collateral carried $268.5M of principal against $371.9M of BTC and ETH. Those figures remain outside the three Syrup pools’ Loan Book totals.
Strategy allocations sit outside these figures. Maple books them as loans to its own wallets, and each contract reports the position it holds (USDG, PYUSD, USDT or USDtb) at about 100% of principal. Maple says that is an accounting record rather than collateral, and that it plans dedicated contracts for strategy allocations. Figure 15 shows the same capital by venue; section 6.2 follows syrupUSDG’s.
Maple’s app publishes assets, quantities, valuations and wallet links for individual loans. The Network Firm’s dashboard checks the Syrup pools’ reported collateral independently. Its latest check is dated 10 November 2026 and puts collateral across syrupUSDC, syrupUSDT and syrupUSDG at $2.00B; it does not list High Yield Secured. The service is run by The Network Firm Tech & Services, not the CPA firm, and says it is not an audit or attestation.
Each kind of collateral also depends on more than its price: custodied assets on access and control arrangements, wrapped assets on their backing and redemption.
5.2 The buffer belongs to individual facilities
The $50M USDT facility backed by USDC reports 100% coverage, leaving no reported excess collateral above principal. Among the BTC-backed facilities, four $25M loans at one borrower address report about 121% coverage. These examples show why aggregate coverage cannot be treated as a buffer available equally to every loan.
Maple’s published process gives a borrower 24 hours to meet a margin call, subject to the facility’s terms, and allows liquidation when the applicable conditions are met. These arrangements sit outside the open-term loan contract, which records debt and payment terms. The disclosures let us inspect more, but control over collateral, legal rights and recovery after a default still depend on each arrangement.
We found no recorded loan impairments or repossessions in the contract set reviewed through 1 November, and Maple’s API listed every open loan as active on 11 November.
6. Turning the portfolio back into cash
The lending book can remain open for months while depositors receive cash much sooner. Across the four pools, withdrawals paid by 11 November totalled $12.16B; about 95.4% of that money arrived within 24 hours of the original request and 99.1% within three days. Each pool pays its queue in order, with partial payments possible as liquidity becomes available.
Request size gives the longer waits some context. Fully paid automatic requests completed within a day received about $420,000 on average, compared with $1.64M for the five completed between 14 and 30 days. That small tail does not establish that larger requests generally wait longer. Reduced or cancelled requests and balances still awaiting payment remain outside the completed cohort, so the distribution describes completed exits rather than every request submitted.
High Yield Secured shows how large a single exit can be. On 10 November one address, 0xb873, asked to withdraw 190.6M shares, about 91% of the pool’s shares and roughly $250M at the 11 November share price. In late October it had been paid $55.9M of an earlier request, and it has since cancelled and resubmitted larger ones. At 11 November the request was a day old and unpaid, while the pool held $0.6M of cash against $273.3M of loans, so paying it depends on those loans coming back.
Fast withdrawals rely on capital returning to the pools, as well as liquidity already available. At 11 November, the four pools held about $27.6M of cash, around 1.6% of their combined net assets. A large exit could therefore require borrower repayments or proceeds from strategy allocations. With over half the Loan Book beyond 30 days’ notice, it would lean on the 26% callable within a week and on those allocations.
6.1 The liquidity policy
April 2026 was the largest payment month, with $2.25B withdrawn. Around the Kelp exploit on 18 April, Maple reported servicing more than $800M of redemptions through the incident and the following 72 hours.
On 22 April, Maple said it had unwound its DeFi lending positions and would hold stablecoins and US Treasury bills as a structural liquidity buffer. The legacy strategy contracts reviewed held no meaningful balances from 24 April. The current portfolio shows that capital can still sit outside the Loan Book, but through a broader set of allocations than just the Aave and Sky positions.
Beyond its institutional-credit facilities, Maple places pool capital in lending markets, stablecoin positions, DEX liquidity and Cross-Pool allocations. They remain assets backing depositors’ shares, but they do not necessarily turn back into stablecoins on the same timetable. A lending-market position, a stablecoin redemption and an AMM position each carry a different route to liquidity.
Cash can meet withdrawal requests directly. Other allocations must first return stablecoins to the pool, so their contribution to the queue depends on their redemption, settlement and repayment terms. Withdrawals keep moving only while idle cash, liquid allocations or returning capital can meet demand.
6.2 syrupUSDG’s strategy wallets
Most of syrupUSDG’s strategy allocations are booked as loans to one Maple wallet, 0xBE8F. Maple says the contracts record the pool’s own positions in DeFi venues, Treasury bills and other Maple pools, and that it plans to move them to dedicated strategy contracts. At 11 November the wallet held seven allocations worth $131.0M, and 0x1D2F held $6M of USDG liquidity on Uniswap, Ethereum and Arbitrum: $137.0M in all, 44% of the pool’s $308.7M net assets.
| syrupUSDG at 11 November | Amount | Share of net assets |
|---|---|---|
| Net assets | $308.7M | 100% |
| Client loans (Loan Book) | $165.2M | 54% |
| Through Maple wallet 0xBE8F (BTC-backed) | $30M | 10% |
| Other borrowers | $135.2M | 44% |
| Strategy allocations through Maple wallets | $137.0M | 44% |
| syrupUSDC and syrupUSDT shares (Cross-Pool) | $51.3M | 17% |
| Aave v4 and Morpho, lent against syrupUSDG | $48.15M | 16% |
| Morpho Midnight USDC | $20M | 6% |
| PYUSD, incl. Morpho PYUSD vault | $11.5M | 4% |
| DEX liquidity (0x1D2F) | $6M | 2% |
| Cash | $6.1M | 2% |
| Accrued interest | $0.4M | 0.1% |
The contracts book rates of 3.75% to 5.75% to the pool, 4.6% weighted by principal, while syrupUSDG’s shares grew at about 5.0% a year over the three months to 11 November. On 11 November some venues paid more than the booked rate (5.1% on Aave v4, 7.0% on the Arbitrum vault including ARB rewards) and Morpho Midnight paid less (3.6% to 4.2% against 5.75% booked). Maple has not said whether earnings above the booked rate return to the pool. $51.3M sits in syrupUSDC and syrupUSDT shares, $20M in fixed-rate USDC lending on Morpho Midnight and $11.5M in PYUSD, most of it in a Morpho PYUSD vault. That $10M allocation shows the route on 6 November: syrupUSDG lent USDG to 0xBE8F, the USDG went to 0xaf69 and came back as PYUSD within 20 minutes, and 0xBE8F deposited it into Morpho’s PayPal USD vault. The mix moves week to week: since 1 November, Cross-Pool grew from $25M to $51.3M with a $26.3M deposit into syrupUSDC on 2 November, PYUSD fell from $23.1M to $11.5M and the pool’s cash from $19.4M to $6.1M.
Another $48.15M goes to syrupUSDG’s own holders. $20M is supplied to Aave v4’s Maple SyrupUSDG spoke, where syrupUSDG is the collateral. Another $28.15M sits in Gauntlet’s USDG Premium vault on Arbitrum, which lends 98.6% of its assets against syrupUSDG at up to 91.5% of its value. A holder can post syrupUSDG there, borrow USDG and deposit it into syrupUSDG again, so part of Maple’s allocation funds leverage on the pool’s own shares. Getting that USDG back depends on how much the venues have not lent out.
The $30M bitcoin-backed facility is a client loan, according to Maple. The client borrows USDC, which syrupUSDG cannot lend, so Maple drew USDG through 0xBE8F, converted it and funded the client’s USDC loan. Our trace shows the converted USDC going into Maple Institutional Secured Lending 2 USDC on 30 October. Of the other syrupUSDG borrowers, 0x6633 ($32.3M at 5.5%, backed by BTC) is a separate client loan.
Three questions remain open: whether earnings above the booked rates return to the pool, how the client facility is held across the two Maple pools, and who bears the loss if that client defaults.
7. Following the next allocations
Maple’s broader allocation mandate expands what can sit behind a pool share. On 2 September, it announced three strategies, starting in syrupUSDT: lending secured by institutional credit and rated securities, financing vehicles holding loan receivables, and a hedged spot-futures basis trade. Each starts with a cap of 5% of Maple’s overall deposit base, so the limit is measured across Maple rather than separately against each pool.
Some of that mandate is already visible in the portfolio. The $7.1M BTC basis-trading allocation in syrupUSDT shows capital deployed beyond conventional collateralised lending.
These strategies widen what a lender has to check, from underlying positions to exit conditions. Securities-backed lending and receivables financing depend on the underlying assets, counterparties and legal structures. A basis trade brings execution and settlement conditions of its own. The same questions that run through today’s book will apply: what earns the return, what supports the obligation and how the capital comes back when depositors leave.
.svg)